World Brain / World Mind Workshop Speakers

Speakers

Michael Arbib
Professor and researcher at the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is an eminent brain researcher and the author of several World Brain / World Mind related articles. He will not be present in person at the workshop but will prepare one or more papers for distribution to registered workshop attendees prior to the workshop. He will also be available for questioning regarding his paper(s) via a telephone conference.

Glynn Harmon
Professor of Information and Library Science at the University of Texas in Austin. Dr. Harmon has published several books, parts of which are devoted to the World Brain / World Mind. He has also participated as a principal speaker at several World Brain / World Mind conference sessions.

Francis Horber
Dr Horber was formerly a professor of Atomic Science in the Physics Department of the Swiss Technical Institute, from which Albert Einstein obtained his doctorate. When he learned about the World Brain concept he decided to devote much of his remaining years to bringing it into being. He consequently became a researcher in the Brain Research Institute at the University of Zurich. He recently attended a brain research conference in Calgary and was offered a position in its medical faculty but could not accept it.

Roy Lundin
Is a senior professor in the Faculty of Education at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. He holds advance degrees in both Education and Library and Information Science and is among the most eminent practitioners of continuing and distance education in Australia. He has headed a number of federal and state commissions dealing with those areas and has published several related reports.

Gottfried Mayer-Kress
Dr. Mayer-Kress was formerly a Physics Professor in Germany. He is now at the State University of Pennsylvania, University Park. He is the author of numerous academic papers and reports which deal with what he calls The Global Brain. He has written chapters in prestigious books, including ones prepared for the U.S. military.

Richard Marcus
He is a retired MIT staff member in the Computer and Information Science fields, and the author of numerous articles in that area. He was also one of the original members of the World Mind Group.

Alan Mayne
He is an independent British Information and Computer Consultant, and holds degrees in Mathematics and Statistics from Oxford. He is the author of the very extensive (70 pages) Critical Introduction to the new edition of H.G. Wells' World Brain. It also includes the currently most extensive annotated World Brain Bibliography. He is the author of several recent other books. He was also one of the original members of the World Mind Group.

Joseph N. Pelton
For a number of years, he was the Director of the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program and also the Director of the Advance Telecommunications Research Center of the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is currently serving as Vice President of Academic Programs and Dean of the International Space University, which is headquartered in Strassburg, France. (It has some 25 affiliate campuses around the world - a virtual global electronic campus). He is the author of numerous books and articles on distance education and on what he calls the International Brain. He will send a videotape of his presentation and will be available to discuss it via a telephone conference following a showing of the tape.

Ivars Peterson
He is the Mathematics and Physics editor of the Science News magazine. He has recently written several articles dealing with the World Brain in Information Science publications.

W. Boyd Rayward
For a number of years he was a professor of library and information science at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He currently hold the position of Dean of Professional Studies at the University. For many years he has researched and published books and articles dealing with a history and the biographies of a few major late 19th Century and early 20th Century pioneers who sought to build and/or built World Brian-like international information service entities. He also has a strong interest in the emerging role of museums and archives along with libraries as part of the newer international information services.

Parker Rossman
He has a Ph.D in Education from Yale University and has taught education courses there. He has lectured at many other universities. Until recently he was Vice President of the Global Systems Analysis and Simulation Project and was Chairman of the Global University Long-Range Planning Committee. He is also the former Dean of the Ecumenical Education Center at Yale. One of his recent books is The Emerging Global Electronic University. He, too, was an original member of the World Mind Group.

Stephan Schwarz
For several years he was Chief Librarian of the Royal National Library in Stockholm, Sweden. He later became a principal librarian and researcher at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. He recently retired and is an Information / Library Consultant and researcher in Denmark, where his wife is the Head of the Knowledge Center at the Technical University of Denmark. (She will be an attendee at the workshop).

Jan Wyllie
He is an information scientist who specializes in document organization, selection, classification, summarization, interpretation, refining and content analysis.